New material applications and transparency are desired by contemporary architects. Its superb transparency and high strength make glass a very suitable building material -in spite of its brittleness- even for primary load bearing structures. Currently we will focus on load bearing glass beams, subjected to different loading types. Since glass beams have a very slender, rectangular cross section, they are sensitive to lateral torsional buckling. Glass beams fail under a critical buckling load at stresses that lie far below the theoretical simple bending strength, due to the complex combination of torsion and out-of-plane bending, which characterises the instability phenomenon. The critical load can be increased considerably by preventing the upper rim from moving out of the beam`s plane. Different boundary conditions are examined for different loading types. The load carrying capacity of glass beams can be increased three times and more using relatively simple, cheap lateral restraints.

Using fluid dampers to connect adjacent buildings for enhancing their seismic resistant performance has been recently investigated but limited to linear elastic adjacent buildings only. This paper presents a study of inelastic seismic response of adjacent buildings linked by fluid dampers. A nonlinear finite element planar model using plastic beam element is first constructed to simulate two steel frames connected by fluid dampers. Computed linear elastic seismic responses of the two steel frames with and without fluid dampers under moderate seismic events are then compared with the experimental results obtained from shaking table tests. Finally, elastic-plastic seismic responses of the two steel frames with and without fluid dampers are extensively computed, and the fluid damper performance on controlling inelastic seismic response of the two steel frames is assessed. The effects of the fundamental frequency ratio and structural damping ratio of the two steel frames on the damper performance are also examined. The results show that not only in linear elastic stage but also in inelastic stage, the seismic resistant performance of the two steel frames of different fundamental frequencies can be significantly enhanced if they are properly linked by fluid dampers of appropriate parameters.

In this paper, a boundary-type meshfree method, the boundary radial point interpolation method (BRPIM), is presented for solving boundary value problems of two-dimensional solid mechanics. In the BRPIM, the boundary of a problem domain is represented by a set of properly scattered nodes. A technique is proposed to construct shape functions using radial functions as basis functions. The shape functions so formulated are proven to possess both delta function property and partitions of unity property. Boundary conditions can be easily implemented as in the conventional Boundary Element Method (BEM). The Boundary Integral Equation (BIE) for 2-D elastostatics is discretized using the radial basis point interpolation. Some important parameters on the performance of the BRPIM are investigated thoroughly. Validity and efficiency of the present BRPIM are demonstrated through a number of numerical examples.

This paper presents a procedure for designing feedback controllers for defective systems with repeated eigenvalues, and also for a nearly defective system with close eigenvalues. For the nearly defective system, we first transform it into a defective one, and then apply the same method to deal with the nearly defective system. A method for computing the gain matrices is discussed here. The methodologies proposed are based on the modal coordinate equation to avoid the tedious mathematical manipulation. As an application of the present procedure, a numerical example is given.

Delaunay triangulation is combined with an adaptive finite element method for analysis of two-dimensional crack propagation problems. The content includes detailed descriptions of the proposed procedure which consists of the Delaunay triangulation algorithm and an adaptive remeshing technique. The adaptive remeshing technique generates small elements around the crack tips and large elements in the other regions. Three examples for predicting the stress intensity factors of a center cracked plate, a compact tension specimen, a single edge cracked plate under mixed-mode loading, and an example for simulating crack growth behavior in a single edge cracked plate with holes, are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the procedure. These examples demonstrate that the proposed procedure can improve solution accuracy as well as reduce total number of unknowns and computational time.

This paper deals with adaptive finite element analysis of linearly elastic structures using different error estimators based on flux projection (or best guess stress values) and residual methods. Presentations are given on a typical h-type adaptive analysis, a mesh refinement scheme and the coupling of adaptive finite element analysis with automatic mesh generation. Details about different error estimators are provided and their performance, reliability and convergence are studied using six node quadratic triangular elements. Several examples are presented to demonstrate the reliability of different error estimators.